seed producers could never make much money because farmers, having bought the seed or the animal variety, would produce future generations themselves. Of course, seeds produced on the farm may contain a certain amount of weed seed and not be produced under the best conditions for germination so, in fact, farmers will occasionally go back to the seed producer for a new stock. In France, for example, the average wheat farmer goes back once every six years to replenish the supply of wheat seed. Hybrid corn is different. Because it is the cross between two self-propagating homogeneous lines, one cannot plant the seed of hybrid corn and get new hybrid corn. Hybrids are not true-breeding. The seeds that are borne on a hybrid plant are not themselves hybrids but form a population of plants of varying degrees of hybridity, a mixture of homogeneous and heterogeneous varieties. A farmer who saved seed from his hybrid corn and planted it the next year would lose at least 30 bushels per acre in the next crop. To maintain high yields, it is necessary for the farmer to go back every year and buy the seed again. So, the hybrid seed corn producer has found a method of copy protection. Moreover, the producer of the hybrid seed can charge the farmer a price for the hybrid seed that is equivalent to the amount the farmer would have lost-that is, the market value of 30 bushels per acre-had he not returned to the seed company for more hybrid seed. The invention of hybrid corn was, in fact, a deliberate use of the principles of genetics to create a copy-protected product. We have that on the best authority possible, the inventors of hybrid corn themselves, Shull and East, who wrote that hybrids are something that might easily be taken up by the seedsmen; in fact, it is the first time in agricultural history that a seedsman is enabled to gain the full benefit from a desirable origination of his own or something that he has purchased . . . The man who originates a new plant which may be of incalculable benefit to the whole country gets nothing-not even fame-for his pains and the plant can be propagated by anyone . . . The utilization of the first generation hybrids enables the originator to keep the parental types and give out only the crossed seeds, which are less valuable for continued propagation.14 The realization that the hybrid method could guarantee to the inventor immense profits has resulted in the introduction of the hybrid method into